The+Bad+Old+Days+of+Abortion

Let's take a good hard look at the pre-legalization horror stories. First, let's visit the abortion advocacy site that tells the most gruesome tales:

Gruesome abortion stories are the mainstay of abortion advocates. But how representative are they of abortion practice in the days before legalization?
 * [|Lest We Forget (WARNING: Graphic)]**

Mary Calderone (then Medical Director of Planned Parenthood) and Nancy Howell Lee (a pro choice researcher) both investigated the practice of criminal abortion in the pre-legalization era. Calderone estimated that 90% of all illegal abortions in the early 1960s were being done by physicians. Calderone further estimated that 8% were self-induced and that 2% were induced by someone other than the woman or a doctor. Lee estimated that 89% of pre-legalization abortions were done by physicians, an additional 5% by nurses or others with some medical training, and 6% were done by non-medical persons or the woman herself.

Calderone's numbers came from "43 men and women from the various disciplines of obstetrics, psychiatry, public health, sociology, forensic medicine, and law and demography." Lee interviewed women who had undergone pre-legalization abortions. The discrepancy between Lee's and Calderone's breakdowns of non-physician abortions is probably due to sampling errors.

Lee, who spoke with women who survived abortions, would of course not encounter women whose abortions killed them. Therefore she would not be exposed to the proportionate number of women who chose the most dangerous alternative. Lee's sample also included only willing survey participants, who would be more forthright and complete in divulging information, such as who really performed the abortion, than women being interviewed by health or law enforcement officials.

Calderone, on the other hand, spoke with those likely to see the botched and fatal abortions, and therefore they would be exposed to a higher percentage of the most dangerous, self-induced abortions. Also, Calderone's informants would have been investigating botched abortions that could be subject to a criminal investigation.

Therefore, women speaking to them would be likely to withhold the true identity of their abortionists to protect them. Also, should the woman die, her family and friends might identify the woman herself as the abortionist, rather than admit their own roles in arranging or performing abortions, in order to close the investigation.

Anecdotal data tends to support Lee's research. Stories of abortions by midwives, orderlies, chiropractors, and assorted lay practitioners like @Harvey Karman and the Jane Syndicate are far too common to represent only 2% of criminal abortions. We would probably not err too far if we relied primarily on Lee's numbers and adjusted them slightly to reflect the slight under-reporting of amateur abortions. Thus, a fair estimate of the breakdown of criminal abortions would probably look like this:

90% performed by physicians 5% performed by trained non-physicians (medical and lay) 3% performed by an untrained accomplice 2% performed by the woman herself

What did pre-legalization abortions look like in practice?
There were physicians who ran abortion mills, physicians who did selected abortions on their own patients, physicians who worked patients in through loopholes in the law. In addition to physician abortionists, there were the professional non-physicians, often operating with training, equipment, medications, and back-up provided by physicians. Here are more representative stories of pre-legalization abortions:

This is the rough profile of who was performing abortions, and how women arranged them. Where, then, does the image of the coat hanger come in?
 * //[|"Dear Dr. Spencer"]//**
 * //[|"Getting Away With Murder"]//**
 * //[|"Jane: An Abortion Service"]//**
 * [|Kate Michelman]**
 * [|One Woman's Abortion]**

Lee's interviews with women who had self-aborted found a different picture from the women who had sought professional (however illegal) abortions. These self-aborting women tended to be less rational, and more self-destructive, than the women seeking competent abortionists. Lee also found that the women attempting self-abortion were likely to have had a death wish at the time of the abortion.

This finding is in keeping with psychiatric literature of the time, which treats self-induced abortion as a peculiar manifestation of the self-mutilating behavior common in patients with certain psychiatric disorders. [|Self-mutilation] in patients with these disorders can range from superficial cuts and cigarette burns to self-trepanning (drilling holes in the skull), enoculation (gouging the eyes out), and amputation of limbs.

Mutilation of the genitals is not rare in these patients, and self-induced abortion was often regarded as an extreme form of genital mutilation aimed at attacking the patient's own femininity. It was in the political context, not the psychiatric or psychological context, that self-induced abortions were considered to be the expected behavior of normal women. This politicized view of self-aborting women eclipsed the reality.

This is not to say that all women who self-induce abortions are mentally ill. Investigators of post-Roe self-induced abortion injuries and deaths found other factors, such as distrust of the medical profession, a perception of home herbal abortion as more "natural," cultural preferences, and "ideosyncratic" factors nobody could readily explain. These women, however, carefully research abortion methods and use common sense and intelligence to select a method likely to be efficacious and comparatively safe. Let's take some time to look at methods preferred by the woman who is thinking out her abortion plan:

Please, don't try these methods at home! I merely wish to illustrate the difference between a woman planning to perform her own abortion and the woman whose abortion is clearly self-destructive.
 * [|Herbs for Self-Abortion]**
 * [|Home Abortions]**
 * [|Self-Help Clinic Celebrates 25 Years]**

What of the women turning up in emergency rooms and morgues? The things they put into their bodies illustrate that there is something more going on than just an attempt to dislodge an unwanted fetus: pine oil, drain cleaner, curtain rods, ice picks, coat hangers, bicycle pumps, turpentine... Every year or so a self-induced or rank-amateur abortion death will be reported to the Centers for Disease Control, showing that the problem has not just gone away with legalization. But the problem is now swept under the rug because admitting that it exists poses a threat to the abortion agenda.

The self-induced and amateur abortions that showed up in the emergency room and the morgue gave some people a distorted view of criminal abortion. Abortion proponents capitalized on and magnified that distorted view. But the truth is that most women who were making a self-interested decision to abort found a competent person to do the abortion. All that's changed with legalization is that abortionists have been given a new clientele -- women who would never have sought abortions had they been illegal. While that's a boon to abortionists, it's hard to argue that more abortions for ambivalent women is a real gain to society, or to the women themselves.

Sources: 1. Nancy Howell Lee, //The Search for an Abortionist//, University of Chicago Press, 1969 2. Alex Barno, "Criminal abortion deaths, illegitimate pregnancy deaths, and suicides in pregnancy: Minnesota, 1950-1965," //American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology//, June 1, 1967. 3. Mary Calderone, "Illegal abortion as a public health issue," //American Journal of Public Health//, July 1960 4. Leon Fox, "Abortion deaths in California," //American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology//, July 1, 1967